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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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The Rasmusen opinion poll in question found that 46% half of black people say that it's not OK to be white.

How was the question worded? Was it the one on this page?

1* Do you agree or disagree with this statement: “It’s OK to be white.”

Leftists have long claimed that the statement "It's OK to be white" doesn't mean only what it appears to based on a literal reading, but is in fact a white supremacist dog-whistle. Whether that's true or not, if the people answering the poll believe it, then I think Scott was a bit hasty to take their disagreement with it as a rejection of the literal meaning of the statement, rather than the white supremacist subtext they believe it to have.

Interestingly enough, when somebody says "Black lives matter" can be read as anything beyond its plain meaning, they are treated as if they were rejecting the plain meaning. The rules are basically heads I win, tails you lose.

Leftists have long claimed that the statement "It's OK to be white" doesn't mean only what it appears to based on a literal reading, but is in fact a white supremacist dog-whistle.

I was around when this stuff first came up.

The whole reason it became a dog whistle is because leftists were and are categorically unable to just say "yes, that is correct" when faced with that statement.

Which was the reason it was deployed in the first place. If lefties/SJWs were capable of reacting to this statement as if it were an uncontroversial nonissue, it would have no power whatsoever. Anytime they want, the lefties can take this 'debate' completely off the table.

But they cannot agree to the statement "It's okay to be white" because that runs counter to their ideological tenets. And so they react poorly to it in a way that is completely disproportionate to the actual semantic content of the phrase. Their interpretation of the phrase is where the controversy comes from, so it's only 'white supremacist' to a particular point of view that is not universal.

So sure, you can characterize it as a dog whistle, but it's a whistle that is only audible to lefties and the only reason it is used by far-righties is because the left erected the framework within which the statement is controversial.

I think politically-active Americans, and politically active American leftists in particular, are used to phrases that sound like they have a literal meaning not meaning what the literal meaning suggests. Take, for example, the phrase "black lives matter". Literally speaking, it's a statement almost everyone would agree with. The people who push back on it are mostly pushing back because they think that if they say "yes, black lives do matter", that will be taken as an endorsement of the sorts of things done by other people who think that black lives matter.

Like I think "it's ok to be white" and "black lives matter" are both primarily communications of group membership, not communications of object-level opinions.

then I think Scott was a bit hasty to take their disagreement with it as a rejection of the literal meaning of the statement

This depends on you actually taking them at their word.

It seems highly self-serving to me to just append "actually it's this Mystical Greater Context that makes this anodyne statement bad", especially when it's very unlikely they will cede that argument if the right-wing were to make it about "love is love" or whatever.

The fact that elements of the Left deliberately refuse to use less inflammatory language (e.g. "minority disadvantage" as opposed to "white privilege", anything other than "mediocre white man" and "gammon"*) OR avoid or condemn race-based insults that cut the other way gives people reason to believe imo that at least part of the appeal is venting ressentiment and taking revenge on specific groups.

Their justifications for this may resolve their concerns about hypocrisy, but it is not inherently a mistake to distrust them.

* I remember the more than hypocritical attempts to justify this on /r/ukpolitics.

A liberal could write these exact paragraphs in response to conservatives disliking the phrase "Black Lives Matter", though.

If 50% of black people genuinely didn't think white people should exist, there'd be a lot more evidence for it than one poll. But every day across the US, millions of black people interact with white coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with no particular malice. (The, idk what to call it, black criminal underclass is less than 10% of black people afaik).

Most of the conservatives I've run into seem to "Yes, and All Lives Matter" that one, which then riles the left up again. If they responded to "It's OK to be white" with "In fact, it's okay to be of any race! Diversity is our strength!" then it would stop working.

I'm sure interactions between your run of the mill Tutsi and Hutus were pretty ok too. And then, to paraphrase one survivor, my neighbourhood friend showed up one day; this time we weren't going out to play, this time I was going to die under his machete.

We've gone from 'blacks' to 'leftists'. But that's rather besides the point, which would be to answer the question Adams supposedly thinks is being asked: Do black people in America like white people? I'd guess that a 50/50 split on the question is not beyond the realms of reason.

If we remove this question from the 'black' context and put it in a 'leftist' context then I think the red herring of 'white supremacist dog whistles' becomes even more clear. Western leftism has an entire doctrine specifically dedicated to verbalizing the hateful otherization of white people and everything that relates to them. I would hazard closer to a 80/20 split with the majority harboring wild anti-white sentiments.

Is my intuition completely off here?

I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of blacks in the US bore resentment against whites, although that's based on a general feeling I get from media and pop culture rather than any hard evidence. Either way I just find it ill-advised to take "almost half of blacks disagree with a statement much of the mainstream media has continually claimed to be a coded message of support for white supremacy" to mean "almost half of blacks form a hate group against whites."

As for leftists, there is certainly a widespread acceptance of casual anti-white sentiments among the mainstream left, something that isn't mirrored on the mainstream right with anti-minority sentiments. That said, I think most far leftists do not hate white people to anywhere near the degree that many far rightists hate their disfavoured racial groups.

No way in hell do 80% of leftists hold wild anti-white sentiments. Maybe 80% of the most terminally online activists? Even then, you are seriously underestimating how many people hold boring, milquetoast beliefs. Hating whites is not normalized to that level.

I will try to find sources once I’m off work.

How would you categorize "NYT picks" like this? Iirc it was one of the top votes comments on the article, and that was in 2017 before the recent swing towards anti-white hostility Zach Goldberg has been documenting

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It's my experience that most pride-flag flying liberals will say insane things like this when they think there'll be no pushback, because it's simply what they've been told all their lives. And mind this is about all white people, and can't be excused as just targeting "bad whites" of lower castes.

I'd categorize everything about it as luxury signaling, and expect it to fold like a cheap tent when faced with any real-world decisions. Look how wishy-washy he is on any actual policy: all the better for garnering polite applause. I'd also put most of the people involved in the extremely, if not terminally, online category.

I'd categorize everything about it as luxury signaling, and expect it to fold like a cheap tent when faced with any real-world decisions.

that was what it was said about SJW in campuses all around the US.

I suspect the stakes simply haven't been raised enough. If it were to come down to dire circumstances like either of the World Wars, where food is tight and industrial nations are reduced to stamping crude submachine guns out of sheet steel, then luxury beliefs will have to be outcompeted at some point.

I suspect the stakes simply haven't been raised enough. If it were to come down to dire circumstances like either of the World Wars, where food is tight and industrial nations are reduced to stamping crude submachine guns out of sheet steel, then luxury beliefs will have to be outcompeted at some point.

It depends what belief is true luxury.

For example, in the most dire circumstances imaginable, proletarian internationalism was put onto the back seat, but socialism, party and great leader stayed and were doubled and quartupled down.

It worked.

In a rational world I would agree; but I don't think anything will trump ideology but a BIG fat pile of corpses in this case, just like with the soviets.

I more or less agree with your reading. And I'll add "harboring" to the list of confusing terms, because I read it as pretty active endorsement, but parsing it as "tolerating" is much more plausible. On the other hand, dilute it too much, and all of us on this sub are harboring such beliefs for daring to talk about them...

I think a lot of this tolerating happens at a reflexive level, like most forms of social signaling. And that when pressed to actually think instead of repeating a slogan, most people will retreat to the motte. Compare "eat the rich" for socialists: the more you press, the more a normal supporter moves from free helicopter rides to progressive taxation.

Signaling is always cheap, and anti-white signaling is on sale right now. I don't like it. But the real test of beliefs is what one does rather than says. I think your <3% number is a lot more realistic than 80%.

What about Ibram Kendi's whole oeuvre?

Kendi's most famous book - How To Be an Antiracist - actually mentions anti-white hatred as one of the types of racism to be opposed, which of course would be far cry from whatever the Five Percenters were saying.

Kendi also advocates for a fourth branch of government superior to the others, explicitly staffed by 'anti-racism experts' (him and his friends) and tasked with preventing all racism. His popularity among Democrats should be alarming.

True, but irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Based on the example below, Kendi is not an example of the hardline progressive position on race. He is not, for example, willing to argue that racism = power + prejudice.

[EDIT] - nope, lost my place in the thread. I would agree that it's straightforwardly true that Kendri is well past anything resembling a reasonable position. He is absolutely an ideological extremist of the sort that must be kept from power at any cost.

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist.

He means any policy that disproportionnately affects blacks in the 'blacks less likely' sense, ie, normal policy, as opposed to his Ministry of Gibs. An easy supermajority of whites are racists according to his definition. He's only not particularly extreme because the mainstream left is hardline already.

On the one hand, he's definately an extremist. On the other hand, there are certainly people significantly more extreme than he is still inside the apparent Overton Window, and with appreciable power and influence. Also, while acceding to his demands would be an prompt-critical disaster, it seems to me that most of what he's interested in demanding in terms of actual policy, we've already done. We have racial quotas, we've largely crippled law enforcement, we've enacted pervasive and effective censorship, so I'm not sure you're right that a supermajority of whites are racist by his definition. A good portion of whites would see nothing wrong with cheering him on. As you say,

He's only not particularly extreme because the mainstream left is hardline already.

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Uh huh. So you guys both swear I won't find him denying anti-white racism is a thing, in the paragraph after conceding the concept is theoretically possible, or things that would sound straightforwardly racist if the races were reversed, right?

bothers with the throat-clearing and fig leaf

Again, it's a whole chapter in his book, argued at length and referring straightforwardly to his own life in an embarrassing sense (as I said, the whole book is structured like some sort of an confession at length, a personal casting out of the sins of racism in Kendi's own personal life). He could have just as easily not written the chapter, and I suspect few would be any the wiser; considering how few people in general I've seen who have even noted that Kendi has a chapter on anti-white racism, expect for lazy dunks about the fact that he mentions his college-era belief in NoI crap in this chapter (precisely in the self-confessional sense), I doubt that many people have even bothered to read the book in even a cursory way, whether supporters or opponents.

He's got a whole chapter about the concept in the book. It's not exactly a hard book to obtain, you can indeed evaluate it yourself. Undoubtedly your average Motte-poster would still disagree with much of what he says in the chapter, since he is still a leftist, but he quite specifically talks of anti-white racism as an existing thing and lists multiple ways in which he says it's harmful.

Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example. Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. They are not one and the same, as the resistance within White nations shows, resistance admittedly often tempered by racist ideas.

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people. For decades, racist power contributed to stagnating wages, destroying unions, deregulating banks and corporations, and steering funding for schools into prison and military budgets, policies that have often drawn a backlash from some White people. White economic inequality, for instance, soared to the point that the so-called “99 percenters” occupied Wall Street in 2011, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ran a popular presidential campaign against the “billionaire class” in 2016.

Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids’ business-class schools could resemble the first-class prep schools of today’s superrich. Where high-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation.

And so on. It's not a particularly good book, in my opinion, but it's still a good exercise to read to know what the specific claims are.

The particular chapter actually got a bit of press since he detailed his momentary youthful, college-era belief about the NoI Yaqub thesis and the idea that melanin gives you superpowers and whatever as examples of anti-white racist beliefs that he believes it is good that he got rid of, which, at the very least, shows that he thinks it is more than theoretically possible to be an anti-white racist.

Big "Kill the Indian, save the man" energy there.

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Good info. I would have bet the same as the others, having never read the text in question.

Hate is an irrational dislike. But to an average lefist, their anti-white views are justified by the oppression they seemingly perpetuate(d). Depending on where you stand on the oppression question, it’s either hate or not. Consider the milquetoast belief ‘racism is still a problem in america’ – meaning anti-black racism, of course. This isn’t a bilateral call for understanding, there’s a victim and a villain. If the villain thinks he’s innocent, it looks like a slanderous accusation has been made up to justify hate, blood libel type. To the believer otoh his dislike and mistreatment of the villain is fair and just, and denies deeper causal feelings. Applies to all oppression narratives, such as feminism =? manhating .

No. That's my intuition as well.

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